Permeation of water into buildings at the base or sill of window and door openings has long been a problem for both new and retrofit construction. Innumerable systems have been designed to solve this problem, but the most common remains the on-site fabrication, generally from metal, of a suitably shaped pan that fits over the sill and directs the flow of impinging water off of the sill. It is necessary that such fabrication be done on-site because of the large number of different widths in which windows and doors are supplied. Such on-site fabrication is both expensive and time consuming.
There has consequently been a long standing need for a readily adjustable door and window sill device which performs the function of inhibiting water permeation while being readily installable in the field with a minimum of on-site fabrication.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,555,882 to Moffitt et al issued Dec. 3, 1985 describes one such moisture guard which is designed to fit under the sill of a door or window. In one embodiment, right- and left-handed moisture guard sections, each having a vertical end wall which engages the frame of the window or door opening, are overlapped to provide a full width moisture guard for door and window openings of varying width. While this Patent describes a significant improvement over conventional on-site fabricated moisture guard systems, it has at least one significant constraint, namely, individual moisture guard sections that are overlapped must be made extremely long to accommodate wide as well as narrow openings. In the case of a narrow opening, it will be necessary to throw away significant useful material which has been fabricated to include end walls, if the sections are made long enough to accommodate very wide openings in the overlap configuration.
The moisture guard or sill support of the present invention, on the other hand, provides a flexible system that yields maximum usage of prefabricated materials with a similar minimal need for on-site fabrication.